Here So Far Away(22)
“Do you find this funny?” I hissed, when the door swung shut behind us.
“Oh, am I not supposed to? This isn’t some joke? How old are you?”
“. . . Seventeen.”
A knife clattered to the floor. I started grabbing things from him, filling the dishwasher.
“You told me you were twenty,” he said.
“It’s not like I’m twelve.”
“You were five years ago! You know where I was five years ago? Five years ago I was working on a riverboat.”
“Because . . . you were a character in a Mark Twain novel?”
Mum peeked in the door. “Why don’t you let me help?”
“Got it, Mum. Seriously.”
“Okeydoke.” She paused, at a loss for what to do with herself, before backing out again.
“George, I’m twenty-nine. You’re seventeen. What the hell were you doing at a bar?”
Now I was the one dropping utensils. Twenty-nine—that was practically thirty. Three decades. Two hundred and ten dog years.
“I dunno. Just blowing off steam,” I said. The nausea from the morning was rising again. “Can we forget it? Please.”
He rubbed his eyes. “Is it too much to expect you to feel sorry about the position I find myself in?”
“No, I am.” And then, because it seemed necessary to state it: “Sorry. I guess this is mutually assured destruction.”
We were studying M.A.D. in Modern World Problems. Supposedly, the reason the Soviet Union and America needed to point nuclear weapons at each other was so neither would fire them.
He took his hands away from his eyes and looked at me. “Mutually assured destruction means that both parties have something equally at stake.”
“Don’t we?”
“I hooked up with a minor. No. No. I hooked up with a minor pretending not to be a minor. A minor who gained entry to a bar and then offered, upon questioning, further assurances of not being a minor . . . We have to tell your parents.”
“Great idea. Pass me that knife?”
“People saw us together—”
“Nowhere near here!”
“If your father is going to hear about it, it should be from us. From me. When it’s just an honest mistake. Not a mistake that we tried to cover up.”
“I’ve been living with the Sergeant for seventeen years—”
He grimaced at the number.
“Seventeen and a half years, and yet I am not a loser. Do you know why? Because I don’t get caught.”
“And if you did, the worst that would happen is what? You’d get grounded? Maybe lose your TV privileges? Whereas I will have made an incredible error in judgment before I even started this job, jeopardizing my chances of getting a permanent position if—”
He checked himself, but not in time.
“If my dad can’t go back to work on a prosthetic foot.”
I picked up the pie from the counter. Mum had slit a cursive W in the top layer of dough, as she always did for special company. It was her version of our family crest, which my dad called—and I only just got this— our “family crust.”
“You know what?” I said. “Do what you want.”
It took a minute for him to rejoin us in the dining room. The jovial waiter routine over, he quietly pulled out his chair and sat down with what appeared like resignation.
Mum touched his arm. “You know, I was thinking, George is out your way often. She could give you a hand with the house.”
“That’s kind, but I couldn’t ask her to do that.”
“She wouldn’t mind, would you, Georgie? You could go over next week and introduce yourself to— What was his name? Rupert?”
“I mean, I have a lot of schoolwork.”
Matthew snorted again.
Francis forced a smile. “Okay, well, I’ll mention it to Rupert. I’m not sure how he’ll feel about having such a young lady around the house.” Such a young lady. “But thank you, Marlene.”
Mum filled the rest of the visit talking about the neighbor’s gout. For once, no one tried to change the subject, and by the time we’d finished the room-temperature pie, I could tell, or hoped I could tell, that Francis had decided not to say anything.
“Why the leave?” Dad asked as he and Mum saw him out. I was listening from the top of the stairs. “You said you were off for a couple of months.”
“Paul!” Mum said. “That may be private.”
“I don’t mind,” Francis said. “My father was sick and then he passed away.”
“We’re sorry for your loss,” Mum said.
“Thank you. And I’m sorry, Paul, for what you’re going through now.”
“Temporary setback.”
After Mum closed the door behind Francis, I heard Dad say, “That guy ain’t police. He won’t last five years.”
Ten
Mr. Humphreys was staring at me from across the cafeteria. He was a tall man with a barrel torso and beefy forearms. He could bust up a fight between the biggest guys at school and carry them to the office by their scruffs, their legs bicycling the air. But usually he didn’t need to use more than a look.
I smiled a sober and healthful smile as I joined Lisa, Nat, and Bill at our usual table.